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Science
writers Mary and John Gribbin reveal how the His Dark Materials
trilogy is steeped in string theory and spacetime, quantum
physics and chaos, symbiosis, entanglement and cold dark matter.
Ideas which are strange and beautiful as Philiip Pullman's
stories, and all the stranger for being true...
You
could be forgiven for thinking that The
Science of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials is
only really going to appeal to appeal to fans of the trilogy.
To some extent that is true. The examples which are taken
to examine the science behind some of Pullman's ideas might
not mean much to non Pullman fans. But, the science is the
important part here. Pullman's universe is simply used as
a shoehorn to explain popular beliefs about the universe we
live in.
Pullman,
in his introduction to this book, admits that when writing
the trilogy he did base a lot of his fanciful notions on perceived
scientific theory. I'm
no techno novice (I was Features Editor of the UK's leading
weekly magazine for the Electronics industry - Electronics
Times), but some of the theories explained here are a
little over my head. And several are just plain fanciful -
like the section on I Ching.
This
book should provide enough material to whet the appetite of
anyone who wants to look into each section a little more thoroughly.
There are some heavy theories examined in this book (and I'm
not just talking about gravity - which is examined incidentally).
And it is to the Gribbins' credit that they manage to put
the theories onto paper without bamboozling the reader with
too much information, while at the same time not patronising
their audience.
In
truth, this is really a science book which has, rather tenuously
been linked to the events in His
Dark Materials.
But, if that is what is needed to drag our children off their
Playstations, and back into reading about the world they live
in, is it really a bad thing?
Certainly
worth looking at if you want to exercise the old grey matter.
Darren
Rea
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